How Business Leaders Avoid Conflict (Collection)

How Business Leaders Avoid Conflict (Collection)

by Michael A. Roberto
Released August 2013
Publisher(s): Pearson
ISBN: 9780133577761

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Book description

Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer, Second Edition offers a powerful framework every leader can use to promote honest, constructive dissent and skepticism; test their assumptions; more thoroughly consider "best alternatives"; make better choices, and align organizations to act on their decisions. In this new edition, Roberto presents new cases from Google, Ford, Intuit, and others, plus expands coverage to more deeply illuminate his decision-making approach. Offering both positive and negative examples, he presents a well rounded view of how to determine when "yes" means "yes," when it doesn't, and what to do when it doesn't. Roberto explains why "good process entails the astute management of the social, political, and emotional aspects of decision making" -- in other words, why effective leaders are well served by carefully "deciding how to decide."

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Know What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen lays out the key skills and capabilities required to ensure that problems do not remain hidden in your organization. It explains how leaders can become effective problem finders, unearthing problems before they destroy an organization. The book explains how leaders can become an anthropologist, going out and observing how employees, customers, and suppliers actually behave. It then goes on to present how they can circumvent the gatekeepers, so they can go directly to the source to see and hear the raw data; hunt for patterns, including refining your individual and collective pattern recognition capability; "connect the dots" among issues that may initially seem unrelated, but in fact, have a great deal in common; give front-line employees training in a communication technique; encourage useful mistakes, including creating a "Red Pencil Award"; and watch the game film, where leaders reflect systematically on their own organization's conduct and performance, as well as on the behavior and performance of competitors.

Table of contents

  1. About This eBook
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Table of Contents
  5. Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer: Managing for Conflict and Consensus, Second Edition
    1. Copyright Page
    2. Dedication Page
    3. Acknowledgments
    4. About the Author
    5. Preface
      1. The Research
      2. The Outline of This Book
      3. Endnotes
    6. 1. The Leadership Challenge
      1. Conflict and Consensus
      2. Decision-Making Myths
      3. Managing Reality
      4. The Absence of Dissent
      5. Tragedy on Everest
      6. The Perils of Conflict and Dissent
      7. Why Is This So Difficult?
      8. A Deeper Explanation
      9. Endnotes
    7. 2. Deciding How to Decide
      1. Managerial Levers
      2. The Power to Learn
      3. The Prepared Mind
      4. Endnotes
    8. 3. An Absence of Candor
      1. Columbia’s Final Mission
      2. Hard Versus Soft Barriers
      3. Leadership Matters
      4. Endnotes
    9. 4. Stimulating the Clash of Ideas
      1. Caufield’s Story
      2. Pulling All the Right Levers
      3. The Leader’s Toolkit
      4. “Watch Out” Situations
      5. Practice Makes Perfect
      6. Endnotes
    10. 5. Keeping Conflict Constructive
      1. Diagnosing the Debate
      2. Affective Conflict
      3. Curbing Affective Conflict
      4. Building a Capability
      5. Freedom and Control
      6. Endnotes
    11. 6. A Better Devil’s Advocate
      1. The Devil’s Advocate in Business
      2. Inspiring Divergent Thinking
      3. The Broken Record
      4. Endnotes
    12. 7. The Dynamics of Indecision
      1. A Culture of Indecision
      2. The Origins of Indecisive Cultures
      3. Endnotes
    13. 8. Fair and Legitimate Process
      1. Fair Process
      2. Legitimate Process
      3. Giving People Voice
      4. The Misalignment Problem
      5. Communicating Intent
      6. Teaching Good Process
      7. What About Conflict?
      8. Endnotes
    14. 9. Reaching Closure
      1. Divergence and Convergence
      2. The Psychology of Small Wins
      3. The 1983 Social Security Crisis
      4. Types of Intermediate Agreements
      5. Shifting into Decision Mode
      6. Sustaining Closure
      7. The Importance of Trust
      8. Endnotes
    15. 10. Leading with Restraint
      1. What Type of Leaders?
      2. The Myth of the Lone Warrior
      3. Two Forms of Taking Charge
      4. Leading with Restraint
      5. Questions, Not Answers
      6. Endnotes
    16. Index
  6. Know What You Don’t Know
    1. Copyright Page
    2. Acknowledgments
    3. About the Author
    4. Preface
      1. The Central Message
      2. The Research
      3. How to Read This Book
    5. Chapter 1 From Problem-Solving to Problem-Finding
      1. Embrace Problems
      2. Why Problems Hide
      3. Making Tradeoffs
      4. Becoming an Effective Problem-Finder
      5. The Isolation Trap
      6. Endnotes
    6. Chapter 2 Circumvent the Gatekeepers
      1. Why Filtering Takes Place
      2. Circumventing the Filters
      3. A Most Prescient Leader
      4. Endnotes
    7. Chapter 3 Become an Ethnographer
      1. Why Don’t People Do What They Say?
      2. Honing Your Powers of Observation
      3. A Few Words of Caution
      4. Endnotes
    8. Chapter 4 Hunt for Patterns
      1. What Is Intuition?
      2. Faulty Analogies
      3. Solutions in Search of Problems
      4. Building Your Pattern-Recognition Capabilities
      5. What Do You Learn at Business School?
      6. Endnotes
    9. Chapter 5 Connect the Dots
      1. “The System Was Blinking Red”
      2. Why Not Share Information?
      3. Information Sharing in Small Groups
      4. How to Facilitate Information Sharing
      5. Mindset Matters
      6. Endnotes
    10. Chapter 6 Encourage Useful Failures
      1. Why Tolerate Failure?
      2. Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Failures
      3. Useful, Low-Cost Failures
      4. Endnotes
    11. Chapter 7 Teach How to Talk and Listen
      1. Crew Resource Management Training
      2. Communication Errors
      3. Improving Interpersonal Communication
      4. Train Teams, Not Individuals
      5. Endnotes
    12. Chapter 8 Watch the Game Film
      1. After-Action Reviews: Promise and Peril
      2. Competitor Intelligence: Promise and Peril
      3. Deliberate Practice
      4. Looking in the Mirror
      5. Endnotes
    13. Chapter 9 The Mindset of a Problem-Finder
      1. Three Dimensions of a New Mindset
      2. Endnotes
    14. Index

Product information

  • Title: How Business Leaders Avoid Conflict (Collection)
  • Author(s): Michael A. Roberto
  • Release date: August 2013
  • Publisher(s): Pearson
  • ISBN: 9780133577761